Trivia

Copy protection

The copy protection scheme in Crime Wave can be broken even if you don't know anything about Assembly language. If you look inside of CW.EXE with any text or hex editor, you can easily see the list of words you are asked to look up from the manual. Since the game neither changes the page numbers in the copy protection question when you failed to answer correctly nor limits the number of failures, it's virtually impossible to fail to pass the protection even if you don't have your manual handy.

You can go one step further and edit the main executables of either program and find the list of words and overwrite them with null characters (ASCII 0) and then hitting enter without entering any word at all will work.

DOS EGA mode

Crime Wave was one of the few games to use EGA's 640x200x16 mode to simulate a 320x200x"136" mode (the maximum number of combinations you can get with 16 different colors) through dithering. You could also run the game in regular 320x200x16, but this looked notably worse.

German index

All versions were on the Germany index for excessive violence (29.05.93). More information about this topic can be found in the game group.

Music

The music in Crime Wave is actually Pink Floyd! It's a snippet of music taken from One Slip, off of Momentary Lapse Of Reason. The specific section is seconds 4:45 - 5:08.

Narc

It's surprising that Access didn't get sued by Williams, since the gameplay, appearance, and even some artistic effects (the "pixel-zoom" effect of the character headshots) are blatantly plagiarised from Narc.

Real Sound

The game uses Access' "Real Sound" technology for digitized sound and speech through a standard PC speaker.

References

In the subway stage there is a poster visible showing the cover art of another game from Access Software, Inc. That game is Mean Streets.